Jayden Cross had the past seventeen years controlling himself, playing roles, following scripts. Now he was a walking lightning storm with no off switch.
Time to see what kind of damage he could do.
He gathered what little focus he had, felt the lightning buildup in his chest, and let it loose. The lightning carried him away in a burst of blue fire, leaving melted footprints and the smell of ozone behind.
Behind him, the transformer fire spread to a nearby building.
Jayden didn't look back.
He needed somewhere to think. Somewhere familiar. Somewhere that was actually his, not his family's, not the hospital's, not anyone else's.
The Den.
Another abandoned warehouse complex he'd bought six months ago—probably illegally since he was underage, but money had a way of making those problems disappear.
His kingdom.
His rules.
The journey there was a nightmare of uncontrolled bursts. He'd materialize on a rooftop, discharge enough electricity to blow every breaker in the building, then get yanked away by another surge. Street lights exploded in his wake. Car alarms screamed. A city bus's entire electrical system fried as he passed overhead, leaving passengers in darkness.
By the time he reached the warehouse district, half of downtown's power grid was fluctuating.
The Den sat in industrial darkness, its neon underglow dead—probably since his accident. Good. He needed the dark. The quiet.
Jayden materialized at the entrance, his arrival blowing the reinforced doors off their hinges. Security system? Fried. Cameras? Smoking puddles of plastic.
Inside, his paradise waited. The main floor where races were staged. The VIP lounge with its $50,000 sound system. His private office on the second floor with—
"Fuck."
The trading setup. Six monitors. Custom-built tower with enough processing power to run a small country's infrastructure. Direct fiber lines to every major exchange.
A seventeen-year-old's $1.1 million middle finger to everyone who said he was just playing with daddy's money.
He climbed the stairs, each step leaving scorched prints in the metal. The office door's electronic lock sparked and died at his approach.
Inside, everything was exactly as he'd left it. The monitors still showing his last positions—shorts on the yen that had printed beautifully while he was unconscious. The keyboard where he'd made more money in six months than most people saw in a lifetime. The whole setup that proved he wasn't just some rich kid, that he had actual skill, actual talent...
"FUCK!"
The scream came with a wave of uncontrolled power. Lightning erupted from his body in all directions.
The monitors exploded in sequence, showering glass and sparks. The tower erupted in flames, circuits frying with sharp pops and hisses. Every piece of his carefully built empire turned to expensive scrap in seconds.
Jayden fell to his knees in the wreckage, electricity still crackling across his skin. The air stank of ozone and melted plastic.
$1.1 million. Gone. Vaporized. By him.
He laughed—broken, bitter sound that came with more electrical discharge. The overhead lights, already damaged, finally gave up and died. Emergency lighting kicked in, bathing everything in hellish red.
This was his life now. Everything he touched, destroyed. Everyone he got near, in danger. The one place that was truly his, and he'd turned it into an electrical graveyard in under a minute.
His phone—miraculously still partially functional—buzzed with an alert. His trading app, somehow still logged in despite the cracked screen.
**ACCOUNT ALERT: Unusual login attempt detected.
The app crashed. When it reloaded, his positions showed impossible numbers. Every trade executing and canceling simultaneously. His algorithms firing in microsecond loops.
He wasn't just interfacing with the phone's electronics. His lightning was IN them. In the network. In the data streams.
For one terrifying moment, Jayden could feel the entire internet like a living thing. Every connection, every data packet, every electrical impulse. He could reach out and—
"No!"
Maybe it was just an illusion?
He threw the phone away. It hit the wall and exploded in a shower of sparks.
But the feeling didn't stop. He could still sense it. The trading networks. The global financial system. All of it electrical, all of it within reach of whatever the fuck he'd become.
A seventeen-year-old kid who'd just discovered he could touch the world's money with his mind.
And couldn't control any of it.
Jayden sat in the ruins of his office, surrounded by burning electronics and shattered dreams, blue lightning dancing across his skin like living tattoos. Outside, sirens wailed—getting closer. Someone had noticed the light show.
He needed to run. But where could he go? He was a walking EMP bomb, a lightning rod with a trust fund, a danger to everyone and everything.
For the first time in his seventeen years, Jayden Cross had no plan, no angle, no escape route.
Just power he couldn't control and a future that looked like nothing but destruction.